Samuel the Inquisitor stood before the village council.

“You want to do what, again?” asked Farmer Shears.

“Inquisit!”

Farmer Shears turned to the village librarian, Ms. Kiwi.

“Is inquisit a word?”

“Of course it is!” Samuel said.

“I don’t think so,” Ms. Kiwi replied. “I think that you’re looking for the word ‘inquire.’”

“Oh, well that’s ok,” Farmer Shears said. He leaned back in his chair until it creaked and hooked his thumbs in his buttonholes while he let a magnanimous look spread across his face. “We’re happy to share information about our little village. What would you like to know?”

“Are any witches, demons or warlocks living in your midst?

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“They’re not worth it,” Myrna said. She put a hand on her husband’s metal arm.

It vibrated beneath her hand because his tungsten carbide cutting blades had wound up.

“But they’re sitting there staring at us,” Mining Unit 1041 crackled. “We have rights.”

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“I said spread ‘em!” Officer Cory bellowed. With his other foot, he kicked apart the suspect’s feet.

He did so several times, as the lower half of the suspect’s body displayed dodecameric symmetry. Every time he kicked apart one set of feet, he’d actually force the other eleven closer together.

“And keep your hands on your vehicle!” the cop said. He handcuffed two of the suspect’s pseudopods together. The other fifteen pressed their tips to the smooth metal surface of its spaceship. The headlights of Cory’s police car bathed the forest clearing with light. The red and blue LEDs in the emergency light bar on the car strobed and gave the scene a tinge of the fantastic above and beyond the presence of the alien lifeform.

One of the pseudopods held a small orb studded with fat, finger-sized cylinders. Cory reached up and knocked it away. It thudded into the grass.

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“Once we get inside the temple, extinguish your torch,” Hiram said.

“Why?” asked his apprentice, Joseph. The pair walked up a small road in the dark, lit only by Joseph’s torch.

“Because the chronocyclops lives in darkness and the blinking of his solitary eye controls the flow of time. If he winks, blinks out of time, or so much as squints at torchlight then there will be disasterous consequences. Thank the chronocyclops pater familias for passing on his terrific rhythm to all of his grandsons.”

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Thanks to Brenton Harper-Murray of Poor Brenton’s Notebook for this guest Moral!

Troy wanted to stay in that Friday night, like he did every night, but his roommates were dead set on making that impossible. He had just gotten home from work, stretched the kinks in his back that he got from hunching over a keyboard coding at work all day. He made a bowl of ramen and sat at his computer for a relaxing night of Internet. He had just found a juicy thread on a message board when his roommates, Bierce and Lox burst in through the door with straining bags from Cut-Rite Liquors in their hands and gin on their breath.

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“So, overall, it’s not that bad living in a dragon’s stomach. Except for Nicholas. He’s been acting a bit dodgy lately.”

Aaron signed the piece of vellum, rolled it up, stuffed it into a bottle, and threw it into the puddle at the other end of the dragon’s stomach. From there, he knew, it would see the light of day. Then he walked back towards the small living room that he had set up with Nicholas and plopped onto the couch.

“When do you think he swallowed that, then?” Nicholas said. He was drinking a beer. Probably the beer that Aaron had snatched from its inevitable march towards the rectum. It was his beer. How dare Nicholas help himself.

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